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Monday, March 19, 2018

Obama Stuxnet cyberwar attacks on Iran's nuclear infrastructure equated to bombing, were first cyber attacks to cause physical destruction. Obama knew his actions could justify attacks on US by other countries, terrorists or hackers-NY Times, 6/1/2012

Mr.
Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush
administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of
the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a
programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and
sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who
began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room
within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R.
Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the
time, Leon E. Panetta,
considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the
progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should
we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the
president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told
it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered
evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the
cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant
was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after
that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was
detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the
5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program
is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former
American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as
well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be
used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it
continue to this day.

These
officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage
program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to
build nuclear weapons.
Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by
18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the
government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have
steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or
more weapons, with additional enrichment.

Whether
Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The
most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran
suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though
there is evidence that some remnants of it continue.

Iran
initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by
Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year,
the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and
Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense
Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our
enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has been scant
evidence that it has begun to strike back.

The
United States government only recently acknowledged developing
cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been
reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members
of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games [Stuxnet] was of an entirely different type and sophistication.

It
appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used
cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving,
with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by
bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code
itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey
Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that
have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University
in April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the
code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about
who was responsible.

A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon called Flame
that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian
officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer
code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say
that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether
the United States was responsible for the Flame attack.

Mr.
Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on
Olympic Games [Stuxnet], was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing
the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with
the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental
missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly
expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using
cyberweapons-even under the most careful and limited circumstances-could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own
attacks....

Yet Mr.
Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States
had no other choice.

If
Olympic Games [Stuxnet] failed, he told aides, there would be no time for
sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a
conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread
throughout the region.

The impetus for Olympic Games [Stuxnet] dates from 2006, when President George W. Bush
saw few good options in dealing with Iran. At the time, America’s
European allies were divided about the cost that imposing sanctions on
Iran would have on their own economies. Having falsely accused Saddam Hussein of reconstituting his nuclear program in Iraq,
Mr. Bush had little credibility in publicly discussing another nation’s
nuclear ambitions. The Iranians seemed to sense his vulnerability, and,
frustrated by negotiations, they resumed enriching uranium at an
underground site at Natanz, one whose existence had been exposed just
three years before....

Hawks in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney
urged Mr. Bush to consider a military strike against the Iranian
nuclear facilities before they could produce fuel suitable for a weapon.
Several times, the administration reviewed military options and
concluded that they would only further inflame a region already at war,
and would have uncertain results.

For
years the C.I.A. had introduced faulty parts and designs into Iran’s
systems--even tinkering with imported power supplies so that they would
blow up--but the sabotage had had relatively little effect. General
James E. Cartwright, who had established a small cyberoperation inside
the United States Strategic Command, which is responsible for many of
America’s nuclear forces, joined intelligence officials in presenting a
radical new idea to Mr. Bush and his national security team. It involved
a far more sophisticated cyberweapon than the United States had
designed before.

The
goal was to gain access to the Natanz plant’s industrial computer
controls. That required leaping the electronic moat that cut the Natanz
plant off from the Internet — called the air gap, because it physically
separates the facility from the outside world. The computer code would
invade the specialized computers that command the centrifuges.

The
first stage in the effort was to develop a bit of computer code called a
beacon that could be inserted into the computers, which were made by
the German company Siemens and an Iranian manufacturer, to map their
operations. The idea was to draw the equivalent of an electrical
blueprint of the Natanz plant, to understand how the computers control
the giant silvery centrifuges that spin at tremendous speeds. The
connections were complex, and unless every circuit was understood,
efforts to seize control of the centrifuges could fail....

When
Colonel Qaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons program in 2003, he turned
over the centrifuges he had bought from the Pakistani nuclear ring, and
they were placed in storage at a weapons laboratory in Tennessee.
The military and intelligence officials overseeing Olympic Games [Stuxnet]
borrowed some for what they termed “destructive testing,” essentially
building a virtual replica of Natanz, but spreading the test over
several of the Energy Department’s national laboratories to keep even
the most trusted nuclear workers from figuring out what was afoot.

Those
first small-scale tests were surprisingly successful: the bug invaded
the computers, lurking for days or weeks, before sending instructions to
speed them up or slow them down so suddenly that their delicate parts,
spinning at supersonic speeds, self-destructed. After several false
starts, it worked. One day, toward the end of Mr. Bush’s term, the
rubble of a centrifuge was spread out on the conference table in the
Situation Room, proof of the potential power of a cyberweapon. The worm
was declared ready to test against the real target: Iran’s underground
enrichment plant.

“Previous cyberattacks had effects limited to other computers,” Michael V. Hayden,
the former chief of the C.I.A., said, declining to describe what he
knew of these attacks when he was in office. “This is the first attack
of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical
destruction,” rather than just slow another computer, or hack into it to
steal data....

In
fact, thumb drives turned out to be critical in spreading the first
variants of the computer worm; later, more sophisticated methods were
developed to deliver the malicious code.

The
first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning out
of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause,
according to intercepts that the United States later picked up. “The
thinking was that the Iranians would blame bad parts, or bad
engineering, or just incompetence,” one of the architects of the early
attack said.

The
Iranians were confused partly because no two attacks were exactly
alike. Moreover, the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks,
recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the
Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating
normally. “This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” one
American official said....

But
by the time Mr. Bush left office, no wholesale destruction had been
accomplished. Meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House days before his inauguration, Mr. Bush urged him to preservetwo classified programs, Olympic Games [Stuxnet] and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush’s advice.

Mr.
Obama came to office with an interest in cyberissues, but he had
discussed them during the campaign mostly in terms of threats to
personal privacy and the risks to infrastructure like the electrical
grid and the air traffic control system. He commissioned a major study
on how to improve America’s defenses and announced it with great fanfare
in the East Room.

What he did not say then was that he was also learning the arts of cyberwar.
The architects of Olympic Games would meet him in the Situation Room,
often with what they called the “horse blanket,” a giant foldout
schematic diagram of Iran’s nuclear production facilities. Mr. Obama
authorized the attacks to continue, and every few weeks — certainly
after a major attack — he would get updates and authorize the next step.
Sometimes it was a strike riskier and bolder than what had been tried
previously.

“From
his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the
Iranian program..."...a
senior administration official said....

But
the good luck did not last. In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new
variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the
worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken
free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage. It fell
to Mr.
Panetta and two other crucial players in Olympic Games — General
Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Michael
J. Morell, the deputy director of the C.I.A. — to break the news to Mr.
Obama and Mr. Biden.

An
error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s
computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer
left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American-
and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had
changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly, the
code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to
ordinary computer users.

“We
think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the
briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that
activity.”

Mr.
Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions,
fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers
came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the
Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”

In
fact, both the Israelis and the Americans had been aiming for a
particular part of the centrifuge plant, a critical area whose loss,
they had concluded, would set the Iranians back considerably. It is
unclear who introduced the programming error.

The
question facing Mr. Obama was whether the rest of Olympic Games was in
jeopardy, now that a variant of the bug was replicating itself “in the
wild,” where computer security experts can dissect it and figure out its
purpose.

“I
don’t think we have enough information,” Mr. Obama told the group that
day, according to the officials. But in the meantime, he ordered that
the cyberattacks continue. They were his best hope of disrupting the
Iranian nuclear program unless economic sanctions began to bite harder
and reduced Iran’s oil revenues.

Within a week, another version of the bug brought down just under 1,000 centrifuges. Olympic Games [Stuxnet] was still on.

American
cyberattacks are not limited to Iran, but the focus of attention, as
one administration official put it, “has been overwhelmingly on one
country.” There is no reason to believe that will remain the case for
long. Some officials question why the same techniques have not been used
more aggressively against North Korea. Others see chances to disrupt Chinese military plans, forces in Syria
on the way to suppress the uprising there, and Qaeda operations around
the world. “We’ve considered a lot more attacks than we have gone ahead
with,” one former intelligence official said.

Jan 17, 2017 - President Obama has granted a pardon to retired Marine Corps general James Cartwright, according to The Wall Street Journal. ... Cartwright, the government alleged, leaked information to the press about the operation. In October, he pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about speaking to journalists.

Jan 17, 2017 - WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday pardoned James E. Cartwright, a retired Marine Corps general and former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his discussions with reporters about Iran's nuclear program, saving him from a possible prison ...

Jun 9, 2012 - Stirring stuff, eh? Obama goes on. "The digital world is no longer the province of a small elite. It is a place where the norms of responsible,
just, and peaceful conduct among states and peoples have begun to take
hold. It is one of the finest examples of a community self-organising,
as civil society, academia, ...

Jun 2, 2012 - A
damaging cyberattack against Iran's nuclear program was the work of
U.S. and Israeli experts and proceeded under the secret orders of
President Obama, who was eager to slow that nation's apparent
progress toward building an atomic bomb without launching a traditional
military attack, say current and ...

Jun 1, 2012 - Obama administration admits the USA was behind Stuxnet ... Despite the damage Stuxnet
caused to Iran's nuclear enrichment program – the virus which was
widely suspected at the time to have orginated from ... However, the Obama administration would not tell the New York Times if it was responsible.